Showing posts with label GarageBand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GarageBand. Show all posts

Tuesday, 24 April 2018

Three, two, one...ACTION!

Hello people and neurons!

Have you enrolled in any course? Come on! Don’t be lazy and be curious! As teachers we need to teach and learn everyday; it doesn’t matter if the course is about Chinese cookery and culture or projects based learning. The important thing is that your brain works, in this way you will encourage your children to be active people, to have curiosity and not to be a couch potato 🙅

Today is the day! Chroma is here! My group and I went to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports last Thursday. Specifically, we went to Future Classroom Lab. It’s a classroom with amazing chairs (yes, my right neuron fell in love with them) and a big green wall. You remember that I explained what Chroma is two posts ago, don’t you? So, we recorded ourselves with an improvised prompter and a mobile phone; the professional recorder decided not to work thad day. It was a good experience and I got some ideas to apply into my classroom.

The recording was in different steps; in total we recorded more or less 20 videos, there were 5 or 6 bloomers very fun. Our creator, Soraya, was the editor, so she brought the videos at home and we start playing with them. How did she make it?:
  • Video: you have to cut the video because sometimes there are gestures or sounds that you don't want them to appear. The app that can make that is QuickTime. It's quite easy to use; apart from cutting the video, you can record your voice, record your screen and record yourself. 
  • Edition: as you know, I used iMovie. It was easy? Well, Google and YouTube helped me a little bit to figure out how to mix music, headlines, the background photos and our videos without making any mess! Is it intuitive? I love trying new things and touching and clicking here and there, but it arrived one moment that I had to look for tutorials. Is it a waste if time? No way! I can't be happier with the result. It took time, but tell me that you don’t love it! 💞
  • Backgrounds: Pixabay was my friend but iMovie also helped me. It's got picture and video backgrounds where you can add words. You cannot change the templates, but for this project I didn't need to change them; they were quite useful.
  • Sounds: GarageBand has got sounds that you can incorporate into iMovie (I love when the apps sincronice themselves). Besides I looked for more sounds and audio effects online. On this website you can find a lot of free sounds, you can pay too for more. 
  • Patience: a lot of patience to create this and don't make the laptop fly across the window!

Our project was called Channel 4, we wanted to create a news programme where our kids have to work in different areas. The storyboard is here and now, now I am so proud of introducing the amazing, the fantastic, the unbeatable video. Enjoy it!



I started to play with Chroma in my lessons, only to check if green paper could be an alternative to green paper and it worked! I recorded some of my students with the app TouchCast; highly recommended it. In this app the templates are done, then you avoid all the time with the edition step (this is very important because the time that you spend in an activity is very crucial for your organization; I liked iMovie but I know that I couldn't use each week for the following reasons: the time and the surprise element; maybe TouchCast can solve the problem about the time and for the surprise element I can create different programmes, not only news).

I hope this post encourages you to do different things in your lessons and start to use Chroma or videos in general. Have fun!

TwoTwo

P.S. In some parts of the video, on the right side, you can see ghosts. They are not ghosts, these are us that didn't control quite well the light on the wall 😬

Saturday, 7 April 2018

To be or not to be

Hello my friends!

How are you? I have to say that I am quite excited with this post, as usual! Today I want to share with you what a Podcast is and how to create it to teach in your lessons (I am going to do it next week with my 6th graders! I'm so excited 💪 Wish me luck 🍀). 

A Podcast is an audio file with a lot of possibilities, it can improve the confidence of your students, their pronunciation, their fluency and accuracy. I will answer you the following questions and you will understand it better.

How can I create a podcast? I use GarageBand, it's an app for Apple devices but let me say that it's wonderful. You can add loops, change your voice, add more loops and even add music. Do you want to play the guitar with this app? You can! If you haven't got an Apple device, Audacity is other alternative, different neurons have told me that it's easy, but my right neuron doesn't' agree!

Where can I storage my podcast? Once you've created your podcast, you need a room to keep it. My option is SoundCloud; it's free and very easy to use. From GarageBand you can share your podcasts and creations directly with SoundCloud. It's a piece of cake.

Why do you have to create a podcast and you can't continue with my boring and useless lessons? Are you sure that you need an answer? Think it twice 😏

I created a podcast as a welcome in my audio project called To be or not to be. We are in April, April celebrates Saint George (in some regions in Spain the 23rd of April people gift books and roses) and Shakespeare death and birth. For this reason, I though that it will be a good idea to start a new project with Shakespeare. Ready? Steady? Go?

The first that I did it was to create a lesson plan. The draft is in Google Drive and I created a Google doc. You can create documents, presentations, questionnaire and spreadsheet. The best thing is that you are working online and the document is saved in the cloud.




Then, I created the podcast with GarageBand, I added to my channel in SoundCloud and I wrote some hashtags. Here you can listen to the voices of  Romeo, Juliet and my creator. She mixed some voices and music. I really love it!



You should be familiar with different concepts when you create an audio channel. The audio channel is the main page, your profile and, the playlists are the different folders with different music. This is my audio channel (yes, I've only created a podcast, but wait a couple of weeks):



Do you study with music? And what about your students? This is my favourite playlist; it's called Study and I play it when I am doing projects, planning lessons or thinking about my final thesis 😅 



Explore the many posibilites that these apps have got and share your projects!

TwoTwo